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Meandering the Midlands

Continuing our cruise up the Coventry canal has taken us through some beautiful countryside. And having helped our friends, it was now our turn to take Firecrest down the Atherstone locks.

There are often volunteer lockies here and a community that takes great pride in their canal, with plenty of colourful flowers displays. Next time, I shall make sure I have time to explore the town as well. Although it’s a couple of hours hard work, Eric took the strain with the windlass for a couple of locks. As you can see, he has a good work ethic.

We’ve commented on how few herons we’ve seen recently but this magnificent bird flew along side us for quite a way.

There are another 2 locks in Tamworth, the Glascote pair. Which again are very pretty. We moored up at Ventura Park, the retail quarter of Tamworth, a huge consumer complex, it turns out we were moored next to the Jolly Sailor, not a pub, or a boater, but the car sales hub. We have friends/business associates in Tamworth and Chris has joked that his P&P is Personal and a Pint. Chris and Edna took us on walking tour of the town, and despite the sprawling new housing estates, they are rightly very proud of its heritage. Unfortunately it was evening and not enough light for my photos to do justice to the town. Though being evening we did go out for a rather tasty Bangladesh meal.

The following day we were passed by another Braidbar boat, One Day, owned by Anna and Martin, this was one of the newly built boats at one of the open weekends that inspired us, so as we had spent a fair bit of time looking around their boat, it was pleasure to invite them onto Firecrest for a cuppa.